Hacking can ruin someone’s reputation and cost them thousands of dollars in lost advertising revenue. Dale Berry is the owner of an English preschool in Japan. He was the victim of a hacking attack on his Facebook account stolen. Hackers used his account to run fraudulent ads, draining his business and ruining his reputation.

The hackers initially targeted users with weak passwords, such as “qwerty” and “password.” Once they have access to an account, they scan the top five most popular friends and pretend to be one of them to ask for a password reset number. They then take advantage of an option to secure users to add friends as trusted contacts in case they forget their password and ask trusted friends to give them the one-time password needed to what does winsock reset do gain access to the account.

Purchase of stolen login information is another way hackers gain access. Recently there was a cache of 26 million Amazon, LinkedIn, and Facebook passwords was discovered for sale on dark web. A large portion of them were leaked through custom Trojan malware that infiltrated millions Windows-based computers between the years 2018 to 2020.

Users can be protected from these attacks by making sure that the address bar on their browser is Facebook and not another website. It is recommended that users use a password that combines letters, numbers, and spaces. They should not reuse it for another email or social media accounts. Also, they should check their notifications for activity regularly. Twitter, for instance, sends out notifications when users log into Twitter from a new place or device.